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Originally Posted by Ilya  No, it is not. Your statement is that because of certain radicals, you can make the claim that religion kills. Well, yes, religion kills, but so does any other cause for which people can become radicals. It's foolish then to blame religion when the cause, radicalism, is right under your nose. Just like you wouldn't say that atheism, or even the desire for social justice and equality, are to blame for the deaths of Stalin's victims, you can't say that religion is to blame for any of the deaths you have described. |
You do have a point, but then (at least I don't see that I have) I have not made a statement where I claim that all other (or even many) non-religious organized radicals are to blame for the deaths they are causing.
And I have not generalized... or at least that has not been my intension. There are how ever large parts of common religions that imposes beliefs that do lead to deaths. And that only by considering how easy it is to manipulate a human and the direct words of some parts of some religious scripture.
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It is not the religion that is to blame, but the radical priests that claim that condoms are evil. I assure you that the majority of Christians do not believe this, are quite happy with using condoms, or at least approve of others using them if it prevents AIDS. When a kid takes a gun and shoots people in his school, do we blame the computer games he was playing? Likewise, when a priest preaches foolish and harmful things, do we blame his religion?
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Errr... those priests are not in general considered radical. They only preach the Vatican's view on condoms (and other contraceptives). And I do not generalize this to every catholic christian, of course I realize that the catholic church has followers that are at a different degree of orthodoxy, and some might not take the words of the Vatican that seriously.
But, if this priest did not have a million-people religion as support (these priests are not often officially condemned), he would not cause as many deaths as he now is able to. So I do blame the religion, since the organizers of that religion do preach the same views, and do not respect the difficulties that one must take in consideration before start preaching.
And when it comes to violent games, they are not real, but there are of course still people that cannot make any difference, and the do not preach violence directly (often). There is also a large deal of studies that can be made on this area that could give an definite answer to 'do violent video games cause an heighten risk of violent behavior' (or something similar). But in more relation to the topic; I see a difference between the video game and the preaching priest, and I do consider the priests religion to be something that are closer together than video games and random school shootouts.
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Of course, if the harmful doctrines are at the very heart of the religion, you could have a case (and this is why we generally don't tolerate religions like Satanism and ideologies like Nazism, but in this case you are generalizing.
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Not generalizing, just have a wider view of what I consider "harmful doctrines".